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Researchers Try To "Close the Nutrient Cycle" Through Better Waste Recycling
An anonymous reader writes "Converting human waste into usable fertilizer may become the next important development in sustainable living. 'Most conventional farms invest in synthetic fertilizer, which requires energy to produce and is associated with many environmental problems of its own. But by separating out human urine before it gets to the wastewater plant, Rich Earth cofounder Kim Nace says they can turn it into a robust fertilizer alternative: a "local, accessible, free, sanitary source of nitrogen and phosphorous."'"
"The massive wastage of human sewage is probably a modern phenomenon." I can tell you, from a wonderful tour of the Stickney sewage treatment plant outside of Chicago, that in the 70's the solid-waste output was determined to be too contaminated with cadmium to be safe for human food crops. Cadmium comes from the blue dye in jeans, which is washed away in the laundry.
Nowdays, as a poster below has pointed out, pharma and it's metabolites will probably be the challenge.
Abe Noe-Hays here--Research Director at the Rich Earth Institute. One thing I should add is that starting this spring we are participating in a two-year study (headed by the University of Michigan) measuring the levels of pharmaceuticals in urine collected from public toilets, and tracking the movement of those pharmaceuticals into soil, groundwater, and plant tissues. The soil ecosystem is very good at breaking down complex compounds, but some drugs are considerably more resistant to decomposition than others and we are interested to see how they behave. If you want to follow our progress, please sign up for our newsletter! Thanks, mellon, for quoting our FAQ into the conversation.